5g router/pc used as router?

[Stargaze obama]

Unfortunately due to my location, my only internet options currently sit at overpriced non fibre, starlink or I pay a provider upwards of £1000 plus a minimum of 3 other neighbors opting in to get fibre installed.

Non of which I would like to go ahead, 5g in my location is actually very good however, I've noticed 5g LTE routers, or decent ones cost excessive amounts.

Could I build a spare system that acts purely as a router which I hook up to antennas both to receive and send the 5g signals it receives? Such as a pcie card that takes a sim and a switch? Networking is not my forte so any help would be appreciated, I have parts for a basic system but it's only purpose is to use little power and act as a router, as cheap as possible is the aim

[Lurick]

Negative, there are no 5G PCIe cards on the market that would work in the capacity you want, at least none that I can find or know of. There are maybe a couple from Sierra Wireless in m.2 for factor for laptops but you're not going to get good performance from that compared to a dedicated 5G LTE router.

[Stargaze obama]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Negative, there are no 5G PCIe cards on the market that would work in the capacity you want, at least none that I can find or know of. There are maybe a couple from Sierra Wireless in m.2 for factor for laptops but you're not going to get good performance from that compared to a dedicated 5G LTE router.

What's the limiting factor for performance, the hardware or software, and which area of hardware is so, antennas? Or the pc?

[Lurick]

Just now, Stargaze obama said:

What's the limiting factor for performance, the hardware or software, and which area of hardware is so, antennas? Or the pc?

Both, there isn't any off the shelf software like pfsense|opnsense|etc that will deal with a 5G built in connection that I know of plus the hardware for sending signal in an m.2 form factor is going to be limited by transmit power much more than receive power but still limited in that regards. You don't have standard antennas you can slap on those you have to do a bunch of janky wire work with tiny little connectors that can easily break off.

[HanZie82]

USB tether an old phone that has 5G to the new computer/router

[Stargaze obama]

59 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

USB tether an old phone that has 5G to the new computer/router

I want a permanent solution for all my devices, not something that will eventually get annoying to set up, where my pc currently sits is close to the rock face (house is between cliffs) so my reception is worse there too, it's a difficult problem I have but I have been doing that for a while, the connection is somewhat unreliable 

[Falcon1986]

2 hours ago, Stargaze obama said:

I want a permanent solution for all my devices, not something that will eventually get annoying to set up, where my pc currently sits is close to the rock face (house is between cliffs) so my reception is worse there too, it's a difficult problem I have but I have been doing that for a while, the connection is somewhat unreliable 

The type of equipment you want is not going to be cheap. But if you're willing to pay the up-front cost, take a look at the Explorer 5G from InstyConnect.

 

I would suggest you contact InstyConnect directly to see if their Explorer 5G will work in the region of the world where you live.

 

Aside from that, you can try contacting your local 5G/cellular providers who have coverage in your area. They might have indoor CPE devices to rent, which you can place where you get good 5G connectivity and wire in a switch/AP to extend WiFi coverage. The benefits of going this route are that the cost is likely to be less and their equipment is almost guaranteed to work on their implementation of 5G in your neighbourhood. Plus, the incentive is there to expand 5G coverage because of how short the range is on this technology.

[Stargaze obama]

On 9/18/2022 at 6:18 PM, Falcon1986 said:

The type of equipment you want is not going to be cheap. But if you're willing to pay the up-front cost, take a look at the Explorer 5G from InstyConnect.

 

I would suggest you contact InstyConnect directly to see if their Explorer 5G will work in the region of the world where you live.

 

Aside from that, you can try contacting your local 5G/cellular providers who have coverage in your area. They might have indoor CPE devices to rent, which you can place where you get good 5G connectivity and wire in a switch/AP to extend WiFi coverage. The benefits of going this route are that the cost is likely to be less and their equipment is almost guaranteed to work on their implementation of 5G in your neighbourhood. Plus, the incentive is there to expand 5G coverage because of how short the range is on this technology.

Thanks for the information, I'm looking at a pay monthly 5g router from three atm, also concerned about latency since most 5g areas only seem to support 4g upload speeds, but again thanks

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, Stargaze obama said:

Thanks for the information, I'm looking at a pay monthly 5g router from three atm, also concerned about latency since most 5g areas only seem to support 4g upload speeds, but again thanks

UK?  If so I tried Three 5G as my primary connection for a while and it was great for download speeds and even gaming but there was the odd day or two where it would be completely unusable.  Upload speeds for the reason you describe regularly drop to single digits too.

One particular thing with Three UK is they have two different APNs, one that gives a public IP address (better for gaming but more prone to performance issues) and one that is CG-NAT (less frequent issues but leads to double-NAT).

I think once the whole network goes over to full 5G things should be a lot better but who knows when that is going to happen.

I was very glad once FTTP became available, its a massive improvement and now I just keep Three 5G as a backup and to speedup Steam downloads past Gigabit, because why not.